Sorry, Your Selfie Isn't Art

If anyone ever tries to tell you that Millennials are a uniquely narcissistic generation, don't argue. Just show them this photograph. That's Geraldo Rivera's selfie, which he posted on Twitter, by his own admission because he was bored and had had a few drinks, with the message "70 is the new 50 (Erica and family are going to be so pissed... but at my age...)." The story turned into an even more spectacular display of pathetic self-justification and self-loathing when none other than Eliot Spitzer decided to offer the mustached one advice, noting that the public would eventually "forgive him." It's unclear, at least to me, what exactly the public has to forgive. Rivera was merely indulging in what has becoming one of the most widespread activities of the moment. He was taking an embarrassing selfie out of drunken boredom. Who hasn't done that by now?

The selfie has become so dominant a form, it may even be shaping technology. One tech blogger has been led to wonder how many products have been developed, surreptitiously at least, in order to make selfies better:

Did Vine add front-facing camera support just because Jack Dorsey wanted to take six-second video selfies? Did Instagram finally add video support so people could up the ante by taking 15-second video selfies? Was Snapchat really created so people could take nude selfies without worrying about 'em making their way around the Web? Those are the questions that haunt my lamest nightmares.

Whether any of these devices were specifically designed to take selfies, they may as well have been. Now Shuttr, a device for iPhone and Android created for taking better selfies, has raised over $50,000 dollars on Kickstarter, basically on pre-orders.

The rise of the selfie has been greeted with the usual mixture of wild hope and ferocious anxiety that any new technology produces. Some critics believe that the rise of the smartphone camera will turn out to be as important to the history of art as the appearance of the mirror, which led to new ways of understanding the self through art. Anti-porn activists fear that the selfie has led to "pornification," young women sending images of themselves in poses borrowed from the other visual obsession of our time. (Although given the careers of Anthony Weiner and Brett Favre, the temptation to sexualize the self-portrait may be a gender-neutral trait.) Then there's the more natural idea that the selfie is inherently tied up with rising narcissism, whether as a symptom or as a cause.

There is a problem in the fundamental assumptions of all of these arguments, though: They treat selfies as works of art. To be fair, it's almost impossible not to. For all of human history, and even into human prehistory, making an image was an act that required not just conscious thought but immense effort. That's why a picture was something removed from ordinary life — images possessed sacred properties, special auras and powers. The camera made the image much simpler to make of course, but it didn't remove the consciousness of the act. Taking photographs required expensive machinery and skill. The very recent, very immense jump in our capacity to make images has been soul-boggling. One of my most intense memories as a boy is of going to China, and bringing along a Polaroid camera to take pictures of people's families. A personal camera was unheard of in rural villages. Often the image from the Polaroid would be the only family photograph they would ever own. The leap in the ease of taking and disseminating images from the year 2000 to the present is as great as the leap from drawing in caves to the year 2000. And yet we still think of photographs as if they require effort, as if they were conscious works of creation. That's no longer true. Photographs have become like talking. The rarity of imagery once made it a separate part of life. Now it's just life. It is just part of the day.

(Clinton) Esquire; (Beyonce, Bieber) Instagram; (Rivera) Twitter

The celebrity portrait has come a long way in the past decade. Clockwise: Clinton on the December 2000 cover of Esquire; Beyonce, Justin Bieber, and Geraldo Rivera's selfies on social media.

The ubiquity of image dissemination is so new that nobody really understands what it's doing to its disseminators. In her famous book On Photography, Susan Sontag described the act of taking a photograph as a dichotomy between the photographer's disengagement (standing back watching) and his or her engagement (creating the image). "Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels all events," she wrote. Those conditions used to belong only to photographers. The dichotomy was perfectly encapsulated in Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow-Up. Now we're all in Blow-Up.

The selfie is a result of this new reality. The selfie links both sides of the dichotomy that Sontag articulated. It is a disengagement from the self as much as it is a promotion of the self. It is seeing and being seen at once, in the same act. There are some very beautiful selfies, but they aren't properly art. Part of their attraction, especially with celebrities, is that they're so intimate, unlike the high stylization that's become so normal and all-consuming. Justin Beiber's or Rihanna's selfies don't make them celebrities; they prove that they're stars "just like us." There are currently 90 million photographs on Instagram tagged #me.

Like crazed teenagers unsure what to do with their new powers and hungers, the new image-makers need a mechanism for allaying the desires to photograph and to be photographed. The selfie is the masturbation of self-image, and I mean that entirely as a compliment. It gives control. It gives release. When you feel the urge to become an image, you can, with little effort and almost no consequences. You can call the selfie narcissism if you like, but surely we need to distinguish between narcissism and selfishness or vanity. Because those last two have always been around. The new narcissism is a natural reaction to the changing technology of image-making and image-distribution. And not even Geraldo Rivera can be blamed for that.

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